Nightmares
by Delenn
Summary: NEW:09-28-03.Sometimes you're forced to face your nightmares up front, to deal with them and react to them. Sometimes it's good and you win, and sometimes you get sucked into the nightmare and can't escape.


**Disclaimer: Big shock, I don't own 'em! I'm just messing around, stealin' 'em, cause I can't even rent 'em! How sad is that? So if you still feel compelled to sue, well, you have to have like **no** life!   
  
Author's Notes: This is another Max POV, takes place post season 3, A/M ficcy. Big freaking surprise, I know, seems not only are there millions of those but I do my fair share of them. If you're not a part of the solution then you damn well better be part of the problem, and believe me, I am. So yadda, yadda, yadda, I still think it's cool. Hehe, I'm crazy, I know. However, just to let you know, this is off of the story "meant to be" when Max talks about being betrayed and drug back to Manticore. It's not necessarily from that story, but it's pretty much off of that one idea. But anyway, be a sport and read it, okay? And then you can rant or rave to me in e-mail. Isn't that so much better/funner? You did already click the link and everything.   
  
Summary: Sometimes you're forced to face your nightmares up front, to deal with them and react to them. Sometimes it's good and you win, and sometimes you get sucked into the nightmare and can't escape.   
  
Rated: Light R   
  
Feedback: Love it? Hate it? Go on, you'll be my best friend! See, all you have to do is click the little link! goddess_delenn@yahoo.com   
  
Date Started/Finished: September 26th, 2003**   
  


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Nightmares   
By ~Delenn~

  
  
  
  
There's something about being drug away to your worst nightmare that will inevitably come true, which gives you clarity. Time to think. Now, I'm not talking about those first few minutes; then you're clawing and punching and doing everything in your power to escape.   
  
No, I'm talking about after, when you've already been caught and you know it. All that waits is the torture that you know is coming, but you can't focus on that because it's going to be scary and painful, so instead you think about something, anything, else.   
  
And you get time to realize, the mistakes you've made, the things you've said, everything, it's like your life flashing through your eyes, but really it's your freedom. At first you think that maybe you didn't deserve it, maybe you deserve this, because you broke his heart and wasted yours on another. But that's not true.   
  
Yeah, you get a lot of time to think right then, to realize how y our life could have gone, to replay anything that could have stopped this outcome, and then you think how your life should go, once you escape. Actually, somewhere, escape is the only thing on your mind, always, until they break you.   
  
The first time they got me, with Renfro, was bad. Between interrogations, Psy-Ops, and the general "break her back into the mold" attitude, it was pretty damn bad, but you make it, ya know? You keep on going and keep on going until eventually they let you rest, then you start to lick your wounds and recoup.   
  
They didn't give me that option the second time. Figured out when I blew up the building trying to escape the first time that they couldn't let me recover enough to even think about escape. And they didn't. Except, this time, before they started with the torture and the psychoanalysis, they decided to run some tests.   
  
Not the good kind of tests, no, the kind that involve submerging you in water and letting you very literally hang there until you're way past your limit of being able to hold your breath. The kind that require them to starve you, carve you, cute you, slice you up and dice you across.   
  
The kind that kill you mentally slowly but surely. Of course, that's the least of your worries. No, you're much more worried about how their little experiment of cutting off body parts and reattaching them will go, or how the slicing you down the middle and checking your internal workings went.   
  
Scars are nothing. It's the never-ending tests and trials and torture. Things that they did to the nomalies when you were little, or that they did when you were first in training. Worse things than you could have imagined, even if you had talked back to Lydecker or refused a mission.   
  
And by the time they're done with all that, and you're starting to heal, let back into your little cell, freedom is the farthest thing from your mind. It seems like some far away dream that you can't quite remember and can't quite believe.   
  
By the time they're done and you're well enough to see others and go back into the endless training, it's "yes, ma'am, no sir, I will follow the set procedure…" So that all the stuff you worked so hard to escape for ten years is more engraved inside of you than ever.   
  
So that by the time they let you out on a mission, and you actually see someone from your old life, who you don't remember and who doesn't even recognize you, it hardly matters. So that when you see the man you love for the first time in over two years it's hard to even remember the emotions you once attached with him.   
  
But even after all that, all the time, all the mind games, all it takes is one look, one "Maxie?" to turn it all upside down and make you see the light. Make you free, make you remember, make you get out of that hell.   
  
And it feels like you're waking up from a nightmare that hasn't ended, a nightmare that has broken your soul. And when you're wrapped in his arms again, and you're sobbing, you look up finally and you expect it all to be back to normal, for it all to not have happened.   
  
It has, it did, it's there, and it's worse than restarting from scratch, it's starting two hundred paces behind. It's finally having the time to look in the mirror and realize that the beauty you were designed to have and that you would have given up to be normal is gone, that the man you look at next to you is just as beaten and broken as you are.   
  
That the scars covering your body and the pain when it's cold or there's a fight won't change. That you can't jump as high or run as fast. That in two years you've aged twenty.   
  
And no matter how much you wish it wasn't so, and no matter how much you pray, you've still been betrayed by two people you trusted, and so has the man you love, and that even if you wanted, you can't have a family now. That you still have to run and hide from the relentless hunts for you.   
  
Worse of all, that this nightmare was real, and you survived it, true, but just barely, and you spirit didn't make it out at all. Because your soul is still sound asleep in your bed two years ago, before the door was knocked down and you were dragged out into this world of your worst nightmares come true.   
  


The End


End file.
